Patreon Insights: Languages of Ardent Tears

Hello Everyone. I know this is late and I'm sorry for that. I've had a busy week. With that in mind, this is going to be a rather short Insight breaking down the language families in Ardent Tears.

First we have the language family that the big three (Midiran, Ferran, and Særan) belong to which are collectively known as the Feldarin languages after the name of the region of Talras they inhabit. When designing these languages I took a lot of inspiration from the celtic languages of our world and I would describe them as feeling fairly fluid and melodic. This is due in large part to how plosives feature in the languages in addition to them being fairly heavy of fricatives and liquids. Unsurprisingly, this is the language family I have done the most work on.

Next we have the Ru'eni languages which can be found throughout the Ru'eni empire, though there is one that can be found in northern Terian'el. These languages are distantly related to the Feldarin languages as can be seen in the word Ru'eni. This literally means People of Crimson in the Ru'eni language and has the same proto roots as the word "rowan" does from the Feldarin languages. The main difference is that "eni" came to mean people in Ru'eni, whereas "an" typically marks an adjective as describing a person or specific trait of a person. All in all a small, but significant distinction.

As for inspiration, I opted to avoid leaning into any one source as the Ru'eni empire can be seen as an antagonistic force in the world and I have no intention of villain coding cultures from our world if I can help it. What I can say about the Ru'eni languages is that they are heavily stressed languages. So much so that they have ways of marking stress in the written forms of the languages.

For the third language family we have the admittedly unnamed family of the nations to the immediate east of Særis. In the grand scheme of things, they are closely related to the Feldarin languages, but with a more germanic spin. A big part as to why I don't have a name for this language family is because it would just be a linguistic classification instead of also being a cultural indicator which I feel is more important here.

Fourth, we have Gallian language family which is seen most commonly on the Gallian Plains of northern Talras. With the plainsfolk being a largely nomadic people, I looked to the nomadic tribes of our world for inspiration when designing their language. I can't go into much more detail here as the Gallian languages are very much in early alpha, as is the fifth language family of Xintalrasi, or Xin for short. The Xin languages are largely inspired by the various Chinese languages and other tonal languages from east asia.

Next, we have the Kairosi languages. With the exception of two distantly related offshoots, these languages can be found in the centre of Terian'el and it is mostly just different dialects of a single language. I'm not sure exactly what inspired the Kairosi languages beyond finding the clicks of the khoisan and bantu languages to be somewhat beautiful. Still, the main thing that the clicks inspired in Kairosi was the presence of ejectives instead of standard plosives as I can't do clicks consistently and I thought it would be interesting to do away with standard plosives. An interesting consequence of this is that Kairosi can't pronounce b's, d's, or g's and t's, p's, and k's are replaced with their ejective equivalents.

After the Kairosi we have the Al'duur and Miriel languages. I'm grouping these together despite being completely unrelated because they are in a similar stage of development. By this I mean I know enough about them in a cultural sense but they haven't seen much active development past a very basic skeleton. Granted, my reasons for this beyond it being a while before the languages become relevant depend largely on the race the language family is attributed to.

Out of the two, I know Al'duur will be the biggest challenge as they are inherently the least human which has a massive impact on the sounds they can make. Furthermore, their language evolved in the completely alien and isolated environment of Dreis. To say they have a unique worldview would be an understatement. For the Miriel, I'm mostly trying to work out how their racial gender fluidity might influence their language. 

Finally, we have all the other language families that exist in the world but are as of now, unnamed and lacking any real development beyond where they can be found on the world map. While I would love to make develop every language family in the world, I have to remember that I'm also an author and making a language for an isolated group of islands on the other side of the world that will never be encountered does nothing to help the story. I'm also not the tower of babel in tiny human form so my ability to linguistically populate an entire planet is somewhat limited.

With all that said, I will end this Insight here. I'll hopefully be back tomorrow, but as my workload is starting to pick up, my ability to get out an Insight Monday through Friday is somewhat strained. I'm still going to do as many each week as I am able, but my injury claim is hopefully nearing its conclusion so I'm getting things ready for commissioning a new cover as soon as I get the money and making sure I've got a good amount of Book 2 ready.